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Product: Instagram Grid Preview launched, composer improvements in the works

We kicked off January with a bang, launching Instagram Grid Preview for Buffer for Business customers!

If you visit an Instagram profile on the web, you will see a “Preview” button that lets you launch a window to see your past and upcoming Instagram posts all in one place. Then you can rearrange as you’d like in your queue until you get the look you want!

On the extension side, we completely redid our Firefox extension this month to be in line with changes from Firefox. It’s working great!

We also continued working on our new composer experience for the extension — improving our desktop experience for all users. We’ve added a few thousand more users to the current version and so far, so good! In January, we brought over the Power Scheduler to the new composer, started working on a feature to show image dimensions when you’re picking an image for your post and improved the initial loading experience. We’re getting really excited about the feedback and data we’re seeing and can’t wait to get this out there for everyone in the coming months!

We’ve kicked off our design work to bring this same new experience to the Buffer dashboard as well. Our vision is to eventually have all the new functionality everywhere you use Buffer.

Speaking of the Buffer web dashboard, we’ve now added support for uploading multiple images per post for Facebook. We also fixed up a few confusing flows around changing your password and added some clarity around timezone settings.

Buffer for Business: Rolling out Twitter Analytics

We’ve started rolling out new Twitter Overview Analytics, which is much more in-depth than our prior dashboard! As we’re using a new backend technology to collect and process the data for this new overview section, we’re only able to collect data going forward and thus leaving the older Analysis section available for the next several months for historical data.

Eventually, once we’ve collected several months worth of data in the new system, we’ll sunset the Analysis tab. We’ll be sure to give plenty of notice before that happens, and I’m confident that the Overview analytics will quickly become the solution of choice for most reports.

While we continue to rollout these new Twitter Analytics, the talented James Morris and I are starting on product design for the Facebook Overview Analytics. We’re well underway and I’m excited to share more as we create it!

We’re realizing some really strong momentum with the new Collaboration Tool for larger teams to better work together for their social media posting. Two more engineers are pitching in to help us accelerate to the finish line. Steve and Harrison are joining forces with Melissa to help us deliver on the first half of the project we’re affectionately dubbing “Phase 1”. Part of what we’re doing now is setting ourselves up for success in the following phases of the project, which will rely heavily on the technical architecture that’s being developed as part of this phase. We’re getting to the point where we’ll be performing several product reviews in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more on this one!

I love all things tech and product and am currently a Product Manager at Buffer!

Product to me means everything from doodling an interface to talking to customers about what we might build next – all to hopefully build the right product to solve the right problems at the right time.

I found this page looking for notes on the Instagram Grid Preview. I’m on the Awesome Plan, and have been waiting for this feature on Buffer ever since I heard of Planogram (now Planoly). If I’m spending $120 a year with you guys, I’m expecting it to include functionality that’s offered free elsewhere.

Please consider opening this feature to Awesome Plan subscribers. A lot of us are small business owners who rely on Instagram for marketing, but can’t justify $100/month as one-person shops. Thanks!

I could not agree more. This function comes standard in the free version on later, and is the sole reason I have left buffer for another platform. I would like to return to buffer but the preview function is so important for Instagram scheduling.

Analysis is the best way to measure results! Congratulations for the great article!

Lara Cattlin

Hey team Buffer,

Can you please open this feature up for the Pro plan? We’re scaling our business and don’t need 25 accounts just yet. So, it wouldn’t make sense to pay an extra $35 a month just for this feature when Plann is anywhere from $4-$12 a month. As Instagram is almost exclusively a visual channel, it would make life so much easier if we could see/show clients a movable grid before publishing.